This paper aims to examine whether and how pre-service teachers’ CE cognition develops during teacher training. In the face of unprecedented challenges in western democratic societies (Lourenço, 2021), civic education (CE) emerges as a key tool to foster active citizenship and create just societies (Joris et al., 2022). This implies that teachers need training to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to teach civic topics and to encourage students to become politically and socially engaged (Lourenço, 2021). Considering this context, two lacunae in existing research literature can be identified. Firstly, longitudinal data regarding the extent to which teacher training programs equip student-teachers with the necessary competences for preparing responsible and active citizens is scarce (Peterson et al., 2015). Secondly, while over the past decades, there has been a growing interest in the concept of teacher cognition, the exploration of pre-service teacher cognition, especially in the context of CE, has received comparatively limited attention so far. Teacher cognition is defined as an unobservable cognitive dimension of teaching that plays a critical role in shaping instructional strategies and that influences students’ outcomes to a great extent (Tavassoli et al., 2023). To address the research aim, a longitudinal approach was employed, surveying first-year pre-service primary and secondary education teachers twice during their training in Flanders. The survey focused on five CE cognition variables measured at the beginning (T1) and end (T2) of training. Variables included perceived preparedness to teach CE (4 items); willingness to address political topics (3 items); perceived importance to address social topics (8 items); willingness to create an open classroom climate (4 items); willingness to implement 14 CE resources (8 items). All items were measured on a six-point Likert scale. The scales demonstrated high internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficient exceeding .7. The measurements were paired, ensuring identification of each student at both time points. To examine changes in student-teachers' CE cognition, paired sample t-tests were conducted. Preliminary descriptive analyses indicate a noteworthy trend: for instance, pre-service teachers' willingness to address both political and social topics slightly decreases from the beginning (M = 4.41/6) to the end (M = 4.35/6) of teacher training. Despite the need for further analysis, these findings offer valuable insights into pre-service teachers' CE cognition development. Understanding this development is crucial as it directly influences teaching practices, shedding light on choices teachers make during CE instruction.

Citizenship education and legality education courses are group training courses that are organized both in the public and private sectors. The purpose of these courses is to allow Italian and foreign minor and / or adult participants to acquire skills in these areas (citizenship and legality) through their active participation in multicultural workshops, managed by social workers who are experts in education to citizenship, legality and multiculturalism.

The objective of this study is to investigate to what extent the education courses on legality and citizenship can be able to be inclusive workshops with respect to their participants and to what extent they can favor consolidation of social relations in a multiethnic society.

The paths to citizenship object of this research are in fact aimed mainly at foreign subjects who in their path of insertion into the host society need to know the rules of the host society such as the Constitution, rights and duties, political system, stereotypes and prejudices, through an active comparison with other Italian participants.

The legality education paths covered by this study are organized for minors and / or young adults who enter the criminal circuit at the request of the Juvenile Court as social reintegration paths and together with other young people of foreign citizenship who are in the same situation, and with respect to situations in which immigrants are victims of the crime.

During these educational paths organized, multimedia material was used, such as explanatory videos of some of the aspects covered, photos, slides, newspaper articles, as well as practical activities in small groups where the participants were stimulated to a critical and empathic reflection on the contents of the project, through moments of confrontation and interactive and participatory discussions.

The experiences carried out have brought out how much these educational paths can bring out sensitivity and attention towards the other and more generally towards people who belong to different cultures, underlining how much the comparison with the other and the lived experience has brought the participants to a reciprocal integration and to live in a situation of "normality" the comparison with children of other cultures. During the workshops, the Italian and foreign subjects actively participated in the ideas and reflections proposed in a co-constructive way and showing their level of empowerment with respect to the topics covered.

According to the sociologist Peter Berger (2014), modernity is characterized by the emergence of constant cognitive dissonance phenomena (Festinger, 1957), provoked by the increase of different beliefs, values, models, and norms with which we constantly come into contact in an increasingly intercultural and interreligious society. When an individual encounters cognitive dissonance, meaning a discrepancy incompatible with what they have already learned, they tend to activate strategies aimed at reducing the discomfort caused by the dissonance and regain cognitive coherence. These strategies, activated unconsciously, can support deep learning and facilitate integration into society, but they can also hinder learning processes and make full integration more difficult. Therefore, it is the task of the school to support the development of a full mastery of cognitive dissonance management processes.

The purpose of the presentation is to highlight how the ideal of "neutrality in education" proves incompatible with this perspective. Pedagogical neutrality takes on different forms today: on one hand, it may tend to underestimate the potential conflict inherent in pluralism and to valorize diverse cultures and traditions by juxtaposing them without facilitating dialogue among them; on the other hand, it may manifest in the neutralization of the public school from all private affiliations.

We therefore propose a third way, an idea of education that is "non-neutral", in which cognitive elements of individuals are not disregarded, their preconceptions are not underestimated, controversial topics, axiological dimensions, and political aspects are not excluded. At the heart of the educational process lies the re-elaboration of beliefs and values, conceived as cognitive tools manipulated by thought (Vygotsky, 1978). In this way, it's also possible to overcome an essentialist and transmissive view of cultural contents: rather than being codified as a place that dispenses knowledge, the school must configure itself as a second-level field of experience (Massa, 1998), within which a semantic utilization of cognitive elements and the re-elaboration of social knowledge is feasible.

Living together in Europe is based on an economic and political integration project and constitutes a community of values that requires co-creation in order to endure.The tabel game "House of Common Values" not only presents the thirteen values of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, but also invites to discuss them in the context of everyday life, to playfully explore them and to develop questions about their content. At various game tables, asylum seekers (N=89) and Master students in Primary Education (N=75) meet and talk about their experiences with the game. The theme of civic integration, which is inclusive and sensitive to difference, forms the overarching goal of the reflections in this paper. Intercultural integration, intercultural competences (with a focus on the task of teachers to promote them), neither civic integration can be planned rationally, but must be lived, precisely in the field of tension between regulations and participation. The "House of Common Values" is an interactive and cooperative game that explores the common values of the European Union, strengthens mutual understanding between participants and respects their diversity. The game also provides an opportunity to reflect on other values such as hospitality that complement and strengthen the common values of the European Union. The game "The House of Common Values" was developed within the framework of the EUMINTProject, which aims to strengthen institutional cross-border cooperation between Italy and Austria in the regions of South Tyrol, Tyrol, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Carinthia, Veneto and Trentino. The aim is to better manage the social, economic, political and cultural challenges related to the phenomenon of migration.

In this presentation, we present our paper entitled „Political knowledge of youth and their proneness to prejudice: Empirical test of direct and indirect effect via right-wing authoritarianism“, that was recently published in the journal Citizenship, Social and Economics Education. Education, as one of the most important socialising agents, has been heralded as a major force for tackling high levels of prejudice and intolerance, mainly through the transmission of democratic and liberal values. We explored the individual-level aspects of political socialisation, but also their interaction with the most important meso-level socialising agent - school programme (Escuin Checa and Taylor, 2017). Namely, we examined how political knowledge, as one of the indicators of youth political socialisation, related to youth generalised prejudice, modelled as a second-order factor that represented the common variance of three highly correlated specific prejudice toward unconventional and/or marginalised groups (ethnic, gender and sexual prejudice). We also examined the role of the secondary education programme in the established relationships, acknowledging consistent differences in the level of political knowledge of students attending grammar, four-year vocational and three-year vocational programmes in Croatia (Bagić, 2011; Baketa et al., 2021), which is connected to their disproportionate exposure to relevant school subjects or otherwise taught content pertaining to humanities and social sciences. We aligned our hypotheses with the Cognitive Ability and Style to Evaluation (CASE) model, which postulates the mechanism underlying the relationship between individual-level cognitive variables and intergroup outcomes (Dhont and Hodson, 2014). We hypothesised that political knowledge, when considered as a precursor of prejudice, can be expected to act similarly to cognitive variables within the CASE model. We performed the test of the hypothesised relationships on a nationally representative sample of 1122 Croatian students in their final year of secondary education (aged 17–19). As expected, there was a significant negative association between political knowledge and generalised prejudice, both direct and indirect via right-wing authoritarianism, i.e., youth with higher political knowledge had significantly lower levels of generalised prejudice. Having in mind the causal order of the variables established in previous studies (Deary et al., 2008; Hodson and Busseri, 2012; Schoon et al., 2010), it can be said that increasing political knowledge and/or decreasing levels of right-wing authoritarianism should result with a decrease of generalised prejudice in youth. Grammar school students had the highest levels of political knowledge and the lowest level of prejudice and right-wing authoritarianism, followed by four-year vocational students and three-year vocational students. Nonetheless, we found the relationship between political knowledge, right-wing authoritarianism and generalised prejudice to be stable across educational programmes. Thus, the same interventions for reducing prejudice, e.g., through increasing political knowledge and promoting liberal values and reducing right-wing authoritarian tendencies, should work in diverse educational settings. We outline civic education programmes as the ones that can bolster both the factual levels of political knowledge and the non-authoritarian values. These programmes should be particularly helpful for students in vocational programmes, whose curricula generally lack humanities and social science content.

Nowadays, in a globalized world characterized by a constant interaction between values, signs, symbols, and ideas, cultures’ boundaries are increasingly blurred. In particular, cultural identity is challenged by those who, like individuals with a migratory background, may experience an oppositional sense of belonging and non-belonging to different cultures (Barnard & Spencer, 2010). These feelings are analyzed by several postcolonial scholars who label these hybridity conditions as Liminal or “Third Space” (Bhabha, 1994), where the individual feels himherself as being "from there, from here, but neither there nor here” (Darwīsh, 2007 pp.176-177) – thus, in-between. At the same time, according to Byrne (2009), Bhabha’s “Third Space” term may be interpreted as an area of interaction and “negotiation” between two oppositional cultures, in which emerge forms of resistance against the dominant setups. These diasporic feelings are witnessed by cultural symbols such as musical productions, since they have a crucial role in expressing identity, as well as means of discontent about their social, economic, and cultural conditions - in particular, referring to genres like Hip Hop, Trap, or Raï produced in Western countries by migrants’ descendants.
By these means of identity expression, emerges the common support for the Palestinian cause, as a symbol of a shared culture and religion, but also a common socio-economic and political issue that includes a collective resistance with other subcultures – who, for this reason, also inhabit the Liminal. This issue goes beyond the Arab/Muslim cultural symbol that Palestine’s history represents: it intersects with a wider political struggle against imperialism and the dominant Western/capitalist ideology. Such phenomena support Homi Bhabha’s thesis (1994) that the Liminal space is also a zone of resistance against the boundaries that rulers try to build.
In conclusion, the Liminal has proven to be an unconventional World in which the (cultural) identity takes the shape of “a contested and negotiable territory of intersection, fantasy, selective affiliation, and disjunction” (Eileraas 2003, p.833). So, it may be interpreted as an extended space of connection between subcultures that daily fight against hierarchies and powers. Unconventional tools like music or social and political activism, facilitate the creation of networking with populations going beyond the national borders – connected by common symbols, feelings, and ideology.

With the current paper, we aim to analyze to what extent cultural production and symbols such as music, may trigger a mechanism through which living in the Third Space encourages migrants’ descendants to actively transform and overthrow the dominant political, economic, social, and cultural status quo. For this purpose, we adopt the methodology of “affective listening” (Niang, 2023), based on the researcher’s critical listening positionality, which is built around a self-reflexive questioning of how race, gender, and other individual features intertwine and affect the world around us (Robinson, 2020). Hence, this innovative methodology would allow magnifying the "organisational properties" (De Nora, 2000, p.151) of music, as an affective medium (Guattari, 1996) that influence the way we experience the world and construct our own identity, and that can be used strategically as a resource for utopian imaginations.